Robyn Hood (Global TV, 2023)

[shevek]

The director of this series, Julien Christian Lutz (aka 'Director X') called this a "superhero show" in his press interviews, so that's what it is.

And it's complete garbage. All the 'Pierre Bernard' channels are saying so, and the ratings are abysmal, literally 1.1/10 on IMDB.
On Rotten Tomatoes, nobody even dared to list it, let alone give it a review - I wonder how long it will stay off that platform.

But here's the single worst thing nobody is talking about in all of their criticism, and it's related directly to the topic of this Forum:
'Director X' utterly destroyed the career of a beautiful actress in order to send his typical woke message.
And he used terrible 'zoomer aesthetics' to do it.

I watched episode 1. Jessye Romeo is well spoken, and she has acting experience. Up close, you can clearly she has a gorgeous face and beautiful long hair. At mid-range, they show her in a tight halter top that showcases her curvy chest and ripped athletic body. Normally, in a based environment, she would be constantly hit on by hood rats (which you don't see at all in the show). To put it bluntly, she is hot!

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In the 90s and early 00s, TV and movies made stars of dozens of similar actresses. They wore tight clothing and participated in strenuous action combat. They were in shows like Xena, Buffy, Cleopatra 2525, La Femme Nikita, Birds of Prey, Black Scorpion, Painkiller Jane, Dark Angel, and Queen of Swords. We loved a lot of those shows, didn't we? And some of them were pretty big hits.

Lutz could have done the same thing here, and he would have turned Romeo into at least a minor action star who would have been cosplayed at Comicons. Add her two sidekicks - the 'social media butterfly' and the 'tech nerd girl' - give them nice costumes too, and they would have been a well-cast trio that would be cosplayable: think Cyberchase or Cleo 2525. There's *already* a Robyn comic book from Zenescope to base it on. Doesn't matter if she's black or blonde or whatever - just make her conventionally attractive, and both normal men and women will watch it.

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Add some training sequences and strenuous action combat scenes in these good-looking tight costumes. Then add a romance with some kind of unrequited love plot where she meets secretly with a hot cop dude who hates being on the 'corrupted' police force and keeps feeding her information to commit her rebellious crimes. They kiss in dark alleys and police interrogation rooms (anywhere taboo and dangerous) and they're all over each other. And boom! you've got a show similar to the CW's Arrow. That's not a bad thing: Arrow was a big hit for quite a long time. This is not rocket science - it took me only a few minutes to think of this.

But instead? Lutz went out and bought three $15 LED fox masks and three $9 camouflage ponchos, and called it a day. Yes, I know where to buy those - Light in the Box or Temu. I go on those sites to buy things, too. But you know what I buy? Sexy block-heeled go-go boots in various colors (I just bought a new pair of gold boots for the upcoming casting of Arogya), which are typically around $60. I don't buy zoomer costumes that you could see at an EDM rave.

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Lutz wasn't concerned about whatever these heroes looked like, or even if they acted like heroes (they don't). He simply wanted to send his political message and he used them as his tools. I feel badly for the actress Jessye Romeo whose career may be stunted or destroyed by the fact that so many people online are calling Robyn Hood the single worst TV show of the year (and it just might be close). She is gorgeous and could have been poured into a tight superheroine costume in any given show like Batwoman or Titans, and could have either made Robyn Hood a hit on its own, or used it as a stepping costume to work her way up to Marvel or DC.

Unless the "fail upwards" algorithm somehow applies (and it very well could), that's probably not gonna happen now.
That is the real "cringe" of what this director did to this actress and the rest of her supporting cast.

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I can't imagine sitting through a whole season of this, the way I did for One Piece (a premise I knew nothing about until I watched it).
Is there anyone out there who really wants me to keep watching this show and reporting on it?
If not, maybe someone else out there can torture themselves.

[Dazzle1]

I saw the preview on Youtube and it was the woke "Let bash the White Man" type of product

I love the story of Robin Hood even the Kevin Costner one.

[shevek]

I saw the preview on Youtube and it was the woke "Let bash the White Man" type of product

I love the story of Robin Hood even the Kevin Costner one.

Men in Tights, Women in Leather. It's pretty simple. Hard to fuck it up unless you really intend to, which 'Director X' definitely did on purpose.

For our Brit friends, I go back a ways, and I have a special fondness for "Robin, the Hooded Man" by Clannad, the theme song to the UK series
from the 80s. Enya's sister was hotter than she was! (just imho)

Peril at 1:29. Tender sexy romance at 1:54. Remember what television used to be like?

[shevek]

Nobody told me they'd take it over for me, so I just kept watching until the end of EP4.
There's no heroine peril, unless you count Robyn slightly overdosing on a test drug, which causes her to stumble around for a bit.

If you want to see two more hot actresses, there's Toronto rapper Chromazz playing "Coco", Guy Gisbourne's sidepiece.

And there's Kira Guiloian, who plays the cold-as-ice sheriff. In EP4, we learn that she's a dominatrix who makes a loyal cop go down on her pussy (not shown, of course). Apparently she learned how to kill and be a sadistic sexy bitch in an orphanage - I'm not kidding, she actually tells the story (which is the only scene in which her hair is down).

I was actually proven right about the masks' cheapness, by the way - at the end of EP4, the Sheriff captures two of the masks that The Hood
(Robyn's gang) wears. She literally says "you can buy these anywhere".

[theScribbler]

Looks like crap. Even the trailer comes off crap.

I have Amazon Prime Video. This show is not on Amazon.





Reminds me a lot of h-burgh. Similar budget.

[shevek]

Looks like crap. Even the trailer comes off crap.

I have Amazon Prime Video. This show is not on Amazon.

Reminds me a lot of h-burgh. Similar budget.

No, we're clearly better, at least in the sense of being a superhero show, in that we have tight and shiny spandex, capes masks gloves and boots, girl power, peril, and actual superheroines. And plots that make sense.

Robyn Hood has none of those things. We have about 30 costumes which each cost somewhere between $60 and $300. The Robyn Hood costumes, as I've said, are $11 LED masks and $9 ponchos. Not even figuratively - quite literally.

Also, I got confused with the Amazon/Vudu listings for an earlier show called "Robin Hood".
This Robyn Hood is on something called Global TV that I've never heard of, but that Wikipedia says is
"Canada's second most-watched private terrestrial television network after CTV, and has fifteen owned-and-operated stations throughout the country."
Global TV apparently does have outlets in the US and elsewhere (for example, Youtuber "Az" was able to watch it in the UK).

I've changed the thread title accordingly.
Thank you for the heads up on that!

[Maskripper]

The idea is really great... a bunch of masked women robs stuff from some crazy rich folks.
Sounds great on paper.
...but then I saw the trailer ...a while back... and was quite shocked.

Ok, I bet many of these 1 out of 10 ratings are ... from a certain bunch of "people"... and they never have seen even one episode or even 5 minutes of one.
But,....the extremely low number of good or average ratings... clearly points toward that it is a crap TV show nonetheless.

Perhaps I will skip through the episodes to see if there is any secret identity/unmasking content... but I doubt there is and even if there is... it will probably have been made really bad.

[shevek]

The idea is really great... a bunch of masked women robs stuff from some crazy rich folks.
Sounds great on paper.
...but then I saw the trailer ...a while back... and was quite shocked.

Ok, I bet many of these 1 out of 10 ratings are ... from a certain bunch of "people"... and they never have seen even one episode or even 5 minutes of one.
But,....the extremely low number of good or average ratings... clearly points toward that it is a crap TV show nonetheless.

Perhaps I will skip through the episodes to see if there is any secret identity/unmasking content... but I doubt there is and even if there is... it will probably have been made really bad.

Yeah, I mean the idea is very sexy on paper and has been done a bunch of times before, even right in the middle of a Wonder Woman episode.
They're not all women, though - only two of them out of five in their bandit group "The Hood" are female. The agenda Director X is pushing is not femininity (second-wave), it's blackness and LGBT (intersectional).

It just so happen that Jessye Romeo is very hot and fit, which is the only reason to watch the show, if there's any reason at all. You can't see what she looks like at all under the mask and poncho. In the fourth episode, she and the very handsome ex-military guy who is called "Little John" share a kiss after a lot of will-they-won't-they, so they'll probably tease that for a while. They're a hot couple. That's about it.

The character of "Tuck" is probably the worst. He's a fat hippie nerd with a big Afro, looking a bit like Questlove, who wants to commune with the universe, and every time he goes onscreen there is John Coltrane avant-garde jazz (or something akin to that) playing the background. He can program computers *without touching them* using 'subdermal implants' but only using the computer he carries around with him in a case.

Anyway, yes there is secret identity and unmasking (just self-unmasking so far). But it is poorly conceived and this is why - the masks are WORTHLESS. The sheriff even says so, "You can get these anywhere".

I would propose that the point of unmasking in your heroine blog observations is that the mask has great value to the wearer, and symbolizes the power and confidence they have being stripped away with humiliation, etc. But the masks in Robyn Hood have absolutely NO value to the wearer. They can be replaced instantly from a store. They are already wearing camera-scrambling camouflage ponchos and could just cover their faces temporarily with those instead. Their masks are there to create a revolutionary anonymity of rebellion, like the way members of Antifa or BLM wear masks when staging riots or property destruction, or the masks from V for Vendetta. The masks are there to subsume themselves into a collective sense of resistance to oppression, not to elevate them as confident powerful individuals as a heroine would be.

Hope that makes sense.

[Dazzle1]

Whenever you try to adopt a historic classic to the modern era, it's always going to be a risk.

I could not get into the modern Sherlock series either the BBC or the U.S version.

In this case they were not only modernizing they were changing genders and promoting woke hate.

[Dogfish]

I for one am shocked that a show that looks like it cost a hundred bucks to make is bad.

[sneakly]

I do like the idea of the villain being a female Dominatrix/sheriff. A trope that is not used often enough in commercial TV. The costumes are just sad. If you cannot aspire to the standards of Asian porn in your costume budget for a main stream production, you are doomed to failure....

Not every medium should its "Plan 9"

[ivandobsky]

I for one am shocked that a show that looks like it cost a hundred bucks to make is bad.

Something looking cheap to me is a sign it might have flown under the radar and actually be good. Big money stuff these days seems to be a designed by committee snooze-fest.
The amount of money required to make a huge difference to the wardrobe used is negligible. It's just taste.
That said, you might need to have Elon Musk money to get something on TV that shows good taste!

[Dogfish]

I for one am shocked that a show that looks like it cost a hundred bucks to make is bad.

Something looking cheap to me is a sign it might have flown under the radar and actually be good. Big money stuff these days seems to be a designed by committee snooze-fest.
The amount of money required to make a huge difference to the wardrobe used is negligible. It's just taste.
That said, you might need to have Elon Musk money to get something on TV that shows good taste!

Seems to only really be a thing for comedy that. I guess because it's cheap.